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Ok so the wrist was sore but to be fair it wasn’t all my daughter’s fault; my son insisted on me carrying him around on my shoulders then started moving around like he wanted to fall off. When I lifted him off my shoulders I twisted my wrist and did some real damage.
It was the same wrist I put all my weight on when I came off my bike some years back (another story) so yeah, wasn’t all the poor girl’s fault.

I digress.

The swimming pool fun over I had to sort out the fuel situation for the car (I spoke about that here. Keep up.) and luckily enough my sisters had been into town returning with a litre bottle full of fuel. Can you imagine filling up an empty water bottle with fuel in London? Me neither.

The fuel was just enough to get me into St Gilles Croix-de-Vie to give it it’s full name, where I was able to fill the tank and get some groceries.

Photo credit Cee Leeya Okay

Getting back to the villa, the kids were riding their bikes round the courtyard and before I could park properly my daughter called out “Look daddy, see what I can do.” She stood up on the pedals BMX style and cycled round again putting a bit more welly into it. The courtyard being loose gravel she lost the back wheel, twisted the handlebars and landed on them with such force that one of the handlebars nearly impaled her. “This was turning into an eventful trip alright.” I thought recalling that ancient curse “May you live in interesting times.”

I carried her inside and laid her on the sofa while we went in search of the first aides on duty. The really helpful bloke showed up and examined her then suggested we take her to a doctor “just in case y’know”.
You don’t ignore that kind of advice and even if I didn’t show it I was a bit worried about internal damage. We were given the address of a doctor about 10 miles away who we were told spoke English. Pretty useful if you have limited French; running the risk of describing abdominal injury as craw craw.

The surgery was in a smart area of Les Fourneries and thirty minutes later we were given the all clear; there would be bruising and the young lady will be needing some rest. Fine with me, I need some of that too. In fact that’s what I thought I was meant to be getting.

Adventures over, we’ll talk about the town of St Gilles and Le Pas Opton in more detail in my next post.